Using Excel to report web analytics is fraught with challenges. This article explores how Next Analytics for Excel overcomes the 6 major obstacles.

When making weekly reports from the Google Analytics API, it is most efficient to download your data using Google’s year and week dimensions. This produces a row of data for each calendar week in the report, but it leaves you with a report that contains no dates — just week numbers. Most people don’t think [...]

Google Analytics uses a line chart across most of their pages, showing the trend of traffic over time. I guess the idea is that you can visually see trends from week to week, month to month, but that has never worked for me. The weekly bump and weekend dips make the chart busy and confusing. [...]

It is surprisingly hard to get day-of-week information out of Google Analytics, and the ‘best’ scenario I have heard is to compare one week to another. That’s not much of a trend, but I guess it’s something. With Next Analytics for Excel, there is a simple way to get reports by day-of-week that lets you create [...]

When building a trend report with Nextanalytics for Excel, you have complete control over the date format displayed. By displaying only the year or month components, the data is automatically aggregated accordingly.

When you get data from other systems (or other countries), you will invariably run into a problem with incompatible date formats. With Nextanalytics for Excel, you can easily adapt to any incoming date format without much effort — and no formulas!